The RS5 has finally made it to America. It's only the fourth Audi with the RS-designation to make it here with the company's top shelf hardware, and it's hard to underestimate what this car means to the quattro faithful. After all, Audi made its postmodern sporting bones by introducing a powerful all-wheel-drive four-seat coupe to a world that didn't know how badly it needed one. Now, a few decades on, the RS5 has been worked over thoroughly by Audi's quattro GmbH and shows every sign of melding the scrappy spirit of the original quattro to the body of a contemporary sports coupe. Which is, of course, what everyone's really hoping for.

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5 For Fighting

It certainly looks the part of the aggressive special edition, outside, inside and on the spec sheet. Inside, you get the usual well-appointed Audi interior, including perfectly good seats, readable instruments, and a thick, flat-bottomed steering wheel, in your choice of blacks. There is also the option of adding Audi Connect, which incorporates Google Earth into the navigation system. All of this is rounded out with Bang & Olufsen sound.

The exterior styling is quietly striking. Audi fives don't have the most arresting shape, just decently clean lines, but the RS has subtle fender flares, bigger engine and brake vents, honeycombed grille, a front splitter and rear diffuser, and oval exhaust finishers, all of which give the car a more aggressive and, frankly, more complete appearance than the A- or S5. It adds up to a small but noticeable difference that extends to the wheels, where up front, 14.4" waveform rotors sit behind 19" standard ten-spoke wheels married to what are, if you'll indulge it, the prettiest wheel hubs we've seen in quite awhile. Ceramic front brakes are available for the usual breathtaking sum ($6000 in this case) as are the five-spoke 20-inch wheels we quite liked on our test car.

Power is put out through the brilliant 7-speed S tronic dual-clutch transmission, which can be set to hold your selected gear until you choose to upshift, allowing you to stay in your desired chunk of the powerband all day or to bounce the engine off the limiter for as long as you want. Of course, that power goes down through all four wheels by way of a quattro system, in this case Audi's "Sport Differential," a new crown-gear center differential with a rear-biased 40:60 torque split that can send up to 85% of available torque to the rear wheels.

About that power and torque: Yes, all 450 horses and 317 foot-pounds of it are generated by Audi's normally aspirated 4.2 liter V-8. Now, while it revs to 8300 RPM and makes a positively wonderful chest-rattling growl when prodded, it's not the most advanced engine Audi has. Never mind that the exhaust baffles are user-adjustable for greater aural involvement, or that the pistons are moving at 26 meters per second at redline, within sight of F1 territory. It's not even their most powerful V-8, which would of course be the 4-liter twin-turbo—which Audi's people firmly claim they have no intention of putting in the RS5.

When gently questioned about this decision, quattro GmbH head of development Stephan Reil, for all intents and purposes the father of the RS5, said simply "There is no engine more emotionally involving than a high-revving, naturally aspirated V-8." A fair point, difficult to argue and, one must admit, impossible to disprove.

Now keep in mind that Herr Reil related this wisdom while standing on pit lane at Sonoma Raceway, where the order of the day was to assess the RS5's limits on the track after several hours of driving it on some of the finest roads in Creation. This can be seen as somewhat ironic, in that the car shares DNA with one of the most innovative, adaptable, and rugged rally cars ever constructed, and we were not exactly being encouraged to go tearing off into the vineyards in search of special-stage style thrills. So it can be safely related that, on near-perfect surfaces, the RS5 is a pretty brilliant car. To be fair, some driving through San Francisco traffic was also necessary, and the RS5 handled this without a murmur or squeak, the Audi's "Comfort" setting ably dealing with streetcar tracks and other real-world inconveniences.

But on the curvy wine country roads and on the track, where the Sport (firmer suspension/tighter steering/gear-selection-holding) and Dynamic (user-tunable) modes came into play and stability control could be turned off, the RS5 simply did what modern sporting Audis seem to do—it made it extremely easy to drive fast with confidence. The biggest quibble will be with the electrically-boosted dynamic steering, which seemed a bit dead on-center and built resistance strangely. At Sonoma raceway, where its limits could actually be approached, it did the stereotypical quattro thing of just plain hooking up and going, with the exception that the eventual understeer that many complain of was not apparent. The result was that the car behaved in a thoroughly neutral fashion and rotated easily. To be certain, I took advantage of Herr Reil's hospitality by having him drive me for a few laps, during which he took a tighter line than was recommended to me, demonstrating several times that the RS5 liked to break all four wheels loose at once when pushed and was extremely catchable in these instances.

But even if the RS5 makes speed easily, is that a departure from classic quattro tradition? Well, we don't recall anyone claiming that the first cars became instant classics because they made driving harder. It's not a question we can answer here; for that we'll need a seasoned expert. For now, it'll have to do that the RS5 is an utterly capable, trackable, and enjoyable car, priced competitively with its competition while still being, delightfully, a thing unto itself.